Case histories are real science, as long as we do enough of them and pay attention to crucialcharacteristics of our subjects' experiences. The case studies presented here provide confirmation of centralhypotheses in language acquisition and have interesting practical implications. Eight subjects, formerstudents of the first author, reported the self-selected reading they did on their own time: the mean gainwas .6 of a point per hour of reading on the TOEIC, with very little variation among subjects, even thoughthey read different things.